The world as will and representation: take one

 

I decided that this summer, I would re-read Ulysses – which I do about every five years – and read a vast text I have never read all of: Schopenhauer’s The World as Will and Representation, starting with the numerous forewords which big S. generated for editions of the work. I’m discovering that one of the reasons that Schopenhauer’s place in literature is more prominent than his place in philosophy courses is that he attacked the very idea of academic philosophy with might and main in that preface. Of course, Schopenhauer, with that white springing doo of his, is a sort of iconic philosopher attack dog, so what do you expect? At the same time, he’s a funny writer. And a paradoxical stylist.

That is another thing philosophers have generally been averse to: a literary style. If a theory  aint reducible to various counters, it doesn’t count, is the idea. A strange idea, I think.

Anyway, I’ll probably write more about the big S. (as I will probably irritatingly call him), but here I just want to point out a connection with the big W. – and that is not Wagner, but Wittgenstein.

One of the most famous sentences in modern philosophy comes at the end of the Tractatus. The whole glorious thing, in English translation, reads like this:

“6.54 My propositions are elucidatory in this way: he who understands me finally recognizes them as senseless, when he has climbed out through them, on them, over them. (He must so to speak throw away the ladder, after he has climbed up on it.) He must surmount these propositions; then he sees the world rightly.

 7 Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent.”

There is something a little strange about the introduction, at the very end of the book, of the “me”: My propositions. Meine Sätze. How are these kinds of things the kind of matter that can be subjected to such a possessive, such an assertion of an “I”? There is something here that chimes in with the large and devouring paradox of Schopenhauer’s prefaces to his Opus, which is that “his idea” – which is how he calls it in the forward to the first edition in 1817 is both so unified and whole as a truth that it seems unnecessary to write a whole book about it – just spit it out, man! – and at the same time can’t be spoken in the preface at all and must be chased by the reader not only throughout the books of the World as Will  and Representation but even in paratexts, such as Schopenhauer’s “Over the four-fold root of the principle of sufficient reason.”

“How to read this book so as to understand it in the greatest possible degree I propose here to set forth. – What might be communicated by this is a single unique thought. Yet I could not, in spite of all efforts, find a shorter way to communicate it than this whole book.“

Another way to the paradox is to ask a version of Leibniz’s question (why is there something rather than nothing): why are there proofs rather than self-evident propositions?

In Wittgenstein’s Vienna, Janik and Toulmin show that Schopenhauer was a key precursor of the Viennese “turn to language” in the 1890-1914 period. The discussion, however, turns on Schopenhauer’s ideas, separated from Schopenhauer’s presentation of his ideas.

Which makes me wonder.